Triple Champs

In the wake of the Dodgers' World Series championship the other day, there was some chatter on Twitter about not only who had won a championship in both NPB and MLB but who on that list had also won a World Baseball Classic championship.  The Dodger's victory meant that that group doubled in size as Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto joined Daisuke Matsuzaka and Koji Uehara.  Matsuzaka and Uehara were both on the 2006 WBC champs and Matsuzaka repeated in 2009.  Between Matsuzaka and Ohtani, the group includes the winners of three of the five WBC MVP awards with Matsuzaka having won in both 2006 and 2009 and Ohtani having won in 2023.  Here are WBC cards for all four players:

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC All Tournament Team #W09A001

2006 Upper Deck WBC Moments #CM-22

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #17

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-27

There's been some additional comments about Yamamoto having not only an NPB championship, an MLB championship and a WBC championship but also a Premier 12 (2019) championship and an Olympic Gold Medal (officially 2020 but actually 2021).  He's obviously the only one with all five of those.  Hell, he's the only one with even four of those although Matsuzaka and Uehara have Bronze Medals from the 2004 Athens games and Ohtani has a "bronze medal" for the 2015 Premier 12.  And for what it's worth, Matsuzaka's the only one of the four to also have a Summer Koshien championship (1998).

Reading all this made me start wondering how many other players have been on the winning team for the Premier 12, the Olympics and the World Baseball Classic.  Luckily, it's not hard to figure out since there's only been two Premier 12s and the only non-Japanese team to win it - South Korea in 2015 - has never won the WBC.  So it's pretty quickly obvious that the only guys to win all three are the players who, like Yamamoto, were on the Samurai Japan rosters for the 2019 Premier 12, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (played in Yokohama in 2021) and the 2023 World Baseball Classic.  There are six such players, including Yamamoto:

2023 Topps Now WBC Champions #WBCJPN-6

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #16 Takuya Kai

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-08 Kensuke Kondoh

2023 BBM Infinity #17

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #10 (facsimile signature parallel) Yoshinobu Yamamoto

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic #91

I wanted to pick cards from the sets for the three tournaments but I had to settle for only two of them because for some unknown reason, there were no cards issued for the Olympic team.

Obviously these six have been in this club for over a year and a half now but until the discussion about Yamamoto, it never occurred to me to see who else had been on the winners for all three tournaments.  With the 2024 Premier 12 starting next week, I thought it'd be interesting to see if there's anyone else who might join this club should Japan repeat as tournament champions.

There isn't.

The roster that was originally announced had Hiromi Itoh on it who was on both the Olympic and WBC teams but he's since been scratched.  Taisei (Ota), Hiroto Takahashi, Shosei Togo and Shugo Maki were all on the WBC squad but not on the Olympic team while Ryoya Kurihara was on the Olympic team but the WBC one.  The only player on the roster who was on both the WBC and Olympic teams is Sosuke Genda, who's already a member of this club.